


An Easter Reverie

by Duckface



Category: Christianity - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-31
Updated: 2013-03-31
Packaged: 2017-12-07 02:21:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/743046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duckface/pseuds/Duckface
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jesus, hot on the heels of his resurrection, remembers an intimate encounter with a trusted friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Easter Reverie

In a low-walled garden, trusting in the shadow of a fig tree reborn, Jesus Christ hid from his disciples.

There were practical reasons for this. The human part of him - still persistently, agonizingly present after the great ordeal - wanted to run after them, peep around corners, spring forth from coffins and coffers like a jack-in-the-box, and properly renew these friendships gone cold as a three-day-old corpse. The divine part of him knew that when a party loses its wizard the narratological impact is lessened if the dude pops up again fifteen pages later with cool powers and a new paint job. No - they would know the meaning of the great sacrifice, and he would stay hid. These hobbits would go on to Mordor alone, even if he had to dress up as a centurion's wife and ride all the way out of town sidesaddle.

And yet this was not why he hid now, face flushed, divine raiments fragrant somewhat from the sweat of his exertions. The reason was - and wasn't it always - Thomas. Thomas, with his flashing eyes and his child's genius, his careless beauty and his swimmer's thighs, separated only by an accident of birth and 1200-odd years of historical accuracy from the seralgio of some eastern potentate. Thomas, who always had to know the workings, who always had an angle, covered his bets and knew his way across the rooftops when angered husbands (or wives) compelled him to make a speedy exit. Thomas, who doubted. Who needed to see proof.

When Thomas bade him lift his robe - when Jesus felt the first brush of fingers against skin, touched for the very first time in this new life - he had thought to himself, idly - how odd that what was once penetrated in anger can now be penetrated in love. How fitting that penetration of the divine by mortal hand should be possible, that this act of penetration should be transformed and informed by curiosity, by doubt, that perhaps the truest penetration can only be occasioned by need - not by devotion, but by the simple need to know, to understand. To penetrate.

As Thomas' finger parted the lips of his flesh, the feathery edges of the wound torn by the soldier's lance, and slid slowly inside, past the moist subdermal lining, past subcutaneous layers of fat, pushing gently but insistently at the walls of the wound - and here, in the remembering, Jesus found that he had idly slipped the middle finger of his right hand into the stigmatum of his left - as the soft tip of his finger came finally to rest on the white shore of his savior's eleventh rib, it was his face that Jesus remembered the most. Suffused with wonder, with a kind of satisfied longing, as if he and his finger had been waiting their entire lives for this moment of clarity, revelation, connection. Was it possible that a man sticking his hand into the open wound of his returned messiah could be so humble, so tender? So sensuous? So slow?

Tracing gently, insistently, and with mounting speed the evidence of his execution in flesh - his breath heavy and labored - the Lord remembered the touch of his disciple, and mourned once again the divine mystery of his being, the paradoxical superposition of the son of god made manifest and the human, all too human frame, a frame now blessed with several extra orifices but cursed with the imperative of a blue-balled godhead; and there, alone in the garden, the Son of Man rose again, again.


End file.
